The author of the current 2026 Virginia assault weapons ban is Saddam Salim, and he published an article in the Falls Church News-Press explaining why he wrote it. The letter is full of lies. Let’s first go through all of the lies that Salim is using, and then we’ll show how they’ll be used to profile black people in Norfolk, Richmond, and the DC suburbs.
Lies
How many lies can Salim fit into three paragraphs about gun policy? Let’s find out.
Lie 1
At the top of my agenda this year is my assault weapons bill, SB 749, which would stop the sale, manufacture, and new transfer of the kinds of high-capacity firearms that turn everyday disputes into mass-casualty events.
AR-15s are responsible for fewer deaths than fatal riding lawnmower accidents nationwide, despite being owned by more people than the entire Asian American population, so everyday disputes are not being turned into mass-casualty events. Lie one.
Lie 2 and 3
I wrote this bill very deliberately so that we are not criminalizing current lawful owners. Instead, we draw a line going forward, so that over time, the most lethal weapons gradually become less common in our communities.
The bill makes it illegal to buy an AR-15, illegal to trade an AR-15, and illegal to sell an AR-15 except to a gun dealer. You cannot sell it out of state and cannot sell it legally in state.You can own it if you owned it before, and you can inherit it, and there’s no tracking for that, which means that every AR-15 transaction in the state after the bill passes will be peer-to-peer with no background check. With one stroke of a pen, Saddam Salim funneled every single AR-15 owner directly into the “gun show loophole.” His claim that he’s not criminalizing gun owners is lie two.
And because all transfers will be checkless the number of these weapons which are transferred to criminals will go up not down. They will become more common in the hands of criminals in Virginia communities. By increasing the relative concentration of these weapons into the hands of criminals, they become more common in communities where it matters, which is lie three.
Lie 4 and 5
In a commonwealth that has lived through Virginia Tech, Virginia Beach, and too many smaller tragedies to count, this is not an abstract debate for me, it is about whether we are willing to accept another decade of preventable grief.
Both of those shootings used ordinary pistols with standard magazines, not AR-15s, so the law he wants to pass would not have prevented either of those shootings. Inferring that his law applies to anything related to those tragedies is lie four.
Even if they were done with AR-15s, the fact that we know both of these were done with pistols means that ones in the future could also be done with pistols. Implying that his law prevents spree shooting grief is lie five.
Lie 6
SB 749 is my answer to the gun violence epidemic
There is no gun violence epidemic. It is a complete fabrication. 2025 had the lowest homicide record in the entire history of the United States of America, and Virginia was no different. Lie six.
Six lies and no truths in three paragraphs. There’s nothing gun related in the linked statement by Salim that isn’t a lie. He’s a liar, and the state of Virginia passed a law based on lies. Some other part of that link talks about ICE, and I didn’t even bother to read it.
Now let’s look at what those lies are going to cause.
Racism
The last time Virginia tried this was 2020, and at that time I did a very exhaustive look at how the Second Amendment Sanctuary movement was going to turn their prior assault weapons ban attempt into a racist profiling scheme. You can read all about that here:
But if you don’t want to follow the links here’s a quick summary.
All the Virginia counties which aren’t being zerg-rushed by out-of-state neoprogressive white liberals passed “Second Amendment Sanctuary Laws” in the two years following Virginia’s last try. Here’s a map.
Seconed Amendment Sanctuaries are definitionally places where laws such as these will not be enforced. All these new laws, including the assault weapons bans, will not be implemented in any county that’s green on that map. Here’s a map of the racial demographics of Virginia.
Fairfax and Louden counties are in the top right corner. Those are two of the wealthiest counties in the country, full of white (and asian) federal government workers suckling off the money printing press while attempting to seize control of the rest of the state through gerrymandering. Every other non-sanctuary is significantly if not majority black. And we know the rich white liberals in these areas are not going to send the cops to kick down the doors of other rich white liberals. Which means the laws will be enforced against black people, just like what happened in New York City with Stop and Frisk.
The purpose of a system is what it does, and this system is a racial profiling system, which makes Salim not only a liar, but also a racist.
Fairfax county resident here (for the moment):
I remain convince that one of the defining characteristics of a progressive is that they cannot understand the difference between truth and falsity. Hence, saying that SB749 is ‘based on lies’ is entirely accurate, and also completely useless. The people doing the lying really don’t care if they get called out on it.
Years ago, I was at a lunch that included a British executive whom I was not eager to have a disagreement with. He did not return the favor. He declared the following (fairly close quote from memory):
"Back home if you're at a pub and some bloke smacks your wife on the ass and calls her 'sugartits', you fight and that's that. But in America, the guns come out and people die!"
He was very sure that this was the difference in "gun deaths" between the two countries.
Notwithstanding the memorable use of "sugartits", he inspired me to google for examples of bar fights turning into shootings in America, and I couldn't find a single one. I suppose a few late-night shootings outside clubs (perhaps involving black celebrities) could count as a stretch version of such a thing, though I don't know of any of those being downstream of a woman being fought over.
What I took away from the experience was the understanding that bar fights ARE quite a bit more common in the country where people are more confident that their counterparts aren't armed. An armed society truly is a polite society.
But this executive? Genuinely clueless.